Sombre

Far from morality and any kind of convention, Sombre is a film that's all about seeing the world through the eyes of a killer. Sound and image on the hand of Grandrieux are combined into something that can only be described as a simulation of a panic attack.

The film is basically about a travelling puppeteer who kills women just before having sex them. Most of these women are prostitutes or strippers and it's natural that when he meets one whose concern is not to arouse him sexually, he finds himself unable to treat her the same. While that may seem contrived, Grandrieux is more concerned with the idea to travelling or moving than the actual story. The plot is there to follow all the changing locations and scenery and along with that the evolving emotions of the two main characters. It's actually real interesting to see that the film suggests that move is most likely the most natural human act, in the sense that being in motion is a type of struggle (interior or exterior) which is the only road to evolution and completion.

I saw this film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The response to this film was divided. Some people applauded, others left the theater before the movie ended. It definitely was a film that hit me. The roughness of the cuts, sounds and lighting, in combination with very few dialogues and conversations, brings about an eerie atmosphere. This is not exactly the peaceful and jolly French countryside as shown in the average travel magazine one would take a glance at! Grandieux makes it look like a hideous, dark place, which (to my mind) suggest the acts of the main character are in some way influenced by that atmosphere. The strongest point of this movie, is the absence of any moral content. ´Why´ is not a question that Grandieux has tried to bring across to the viewers. It is precisely this lack of moral content that frightens some spectators. I can imagine that. However, they cannot deny that it is a very original film. In spite of the fact that the ´serial murderer theme´ can be found in many movies, the approach to this theme is completely different in this film. This is definitely a film which I will remember! I think people will either love it or hate it -I suppose the majority of people will be ´haters´-, actually I am surprised it made some Dutch cinemas. I recommend this film to anyone who likes original, non conventional movies. Give it a try. If you hate it: a VCR has an eject button.

You have movies that are dark because of its style and tone and then there also are movies that are just dark due to a lack of light. And this movie decided so simply use no lights at all, even while the movie is mostly taking place during the nighttime, which causes most of the movie to be just too dark for its own good.

It would had been nice to see more of what was going on at times. I just really couldn't always tell what was happening and you might call it an artistic choice, or something along those lines but I call it cheap and ridicules. I mean it's a movie! You are supposed to be able to tell what is going on, by using your eyes.

This all really prevented me from ever getting into this movie. But besides all of that, I don't think that this movie would had intrigued me any better if it got shot with more light. The story is just too simplistic for that and it isn't really following a main plot to begin with.

Sure, I get it. This is supposed to be a movie that puts us into the mind of serial killer but it doesn't really ever do this in a very engaging way. The main character, besides being a killer, is also a rapist. This makes him even less sympathetic and even makes you more repulsed toward him and the entire movie in general, since there is a whole lot of hard, loveless, sex going on in this movie. Not that I ever was able to see much of it tough.

The movie just never got interesting for me and it failed to put me into the mind of a serial killer. There are numerous movies out there that did a far better job, with a similar sort of premise and setup. Movies like "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" or "Schramm" for example. Or even some cheap TV movies or television series episodes. In other words; it was not so much its concept but more its execution, that was wrong with this movie.

It's a movie that picks a more stylized approach to things and almost wants to be seen and taken as an artistic movie. But really, the movie just isn't being deep and engaging enough for that. It instead is a very distant movie, that doesn't delves into anything.

It's not a horrible movie, or one that I hated seeing (if I ever could see anything that is) but it just is one that fails at ever becoming interesting or engaging enough to watch.

5/10

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Nauseating it is but, genuinely striking film making at work, both disorientating and disturbing in equal measure. If nothing else Grandrieux like Von Treir's "Antichrist" raises the bar for horror films here, but doesn't rely on "gore" and shock the way VT did, instead generating fear from a soundtrack of guttural human cries, moans, noises, and silences, and bringing us unbearably close to characters and sensations we desperately and instinctively want to avoid.

I still think the combination of fairy tale logic into such a brutal close focus doesn't gel as much as Grandieux believes it does, but there is something to be said for the notion that complete sentimentality and utter depravity are closer than they appear. I felt like an insect watching this movie, pinned to a wall of sounds and images. Not a good feeling, but horror films are not supposed to create good feelings are they. What's most horrifying about this film is it's lack of any moral aim, for all there terrors horror films do usually show the triumph of a "final girl" or the humanity of a monster, but like "The Descent" Grandrieux's universe is an unstable chaos of actions, desires, and terrors, but more so because even the logical rules of cause and effect, are no good here (like Funny Games' remote control scene but stronger and stranger), in one scene Claire and Christine escape Jean, only to have him magically appear in front of their car. Next cut he has them in his hotel, seemingly hypnotized as he for lack of a better word...sniffs their fear.

What's so violating about a scene like this is not the violation that goes on within it, but the breaking of narrative rules that we depend on in a film like this, for respite, the chance to escape to breath. Sombre is suffocating, and makes even "love" itself, normally a redeeming force, a horror to behold.

My first impression of Claire's attraction to Jean was echoing the Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?". I felt not the usual jealously one feels when the object of your affection is publicly affectionate to the worst possible kind of person (or a decent person who is transformed into a monstrous caricature through sheer force of jealously alone), but one of panic. She does not know what she is getting into but we (the audience) do, having witnessed albeit elliptically at times Jeans earlier crimes. Eventually she does know who and what Jean is after he attacks her sister, but her attraction seems to intensify as our repulsion grows, and at first I felt this as a failure of understanding character development (no rational human being would willingly go back to THAT). But this was a failure more on my part than the films.

I was expecting realism, when right from the beginning the film announces itself as not existing in a stable mental landscape of coherent naturalism. Our first images are a boy blindfolded in a field feeling his way in the air, then abruptly the sounds of children laughing like hyenas as they watch a Punch And Judy show.The hand-held camera at times jostles around with Jean's or a detached third party pov and at others holds itself sustaining agonizing close ups, all to create it's own kind of rationality(something after watching more Guy Maddin and Mark Rappaport I find a little easier to understand or at least accept).

Claire and Jean's relationship is non-existent guided by the films only symbolic logic(chance or reason/hope), a prop like the puppets in Punch And Judy, but where Mister Punch, would kill his wife, his family, his jailers, and in some versions even Death and The Devil himself, and do so with a smile, Jean wrestles with his demons which are indistinguishable from his desires, and suffers for them. The film's final shots of Jean in the woods recall Lon Chaney Jr's. performance as "The Wolfman"(1941), and all the tragedy, doom, and masculine anxiety there in. In the days of 'Dexter" where serial killers can be heroes too, were all aware that wolves can wear human skin, and men don't need to transform into monsters to make beasts of themselves.

In Fellini's "La Strada" where a lovely clownish child-woman is hopelessly and helplessly in love with a brutish strong man who rapes, torments, and abandons her, we are forced to see "love" as a beastly thing which traps our heroin from the rational action of escape. But it's this break with realism and into the metaphorical which freed Fellini from the other Italian filmmakers of the day and allowed him to progress into his trademark oneiric style, and it's also what gives "La Strada" it's emotional impact, which has to be weighed symbolically not literally. "Sombre" in many ways follows suit, but with more neo-Gothic, and new french extremist aesthetics.

"Sombre" is a difficult film, one which even the most willing to attempt to understand it, will not enjoy the first, second, or maybe any times watching it. I can't say I enjoyed it. I'm not gonna put this on during rainy day like "Slim Sussie" or "Monster Squad", but if I had a friend over who told me they were in the mood for a horror movie, something actually scary (a rarity) I would suggest this.

"...if my eyes don't deceive me, There's something going wrong around here..." -Joe Jackson

There are films that have a very difficult and challenging topic, that may also be very explicit. There are films that are shot in a way that makes them difficult to watch; very quick cuts; rapid camera movement; odd direction. There are films that have a compelling story-line.

This film is all of those.

To begin with, you may be forgiven for thinking that the cinematography methods used here are just to make it look 'arty'. However, as it progresses, I think the extremely dark, edgy, and confused imagery is a reflection of the state of Marc Barbé's mind; closed, confused, searching; helpless. The almost total lack of dialogue adds to the tension, as you are pulled along to an astonishing climax that will leave you thinking.

Whilst you are watching it not everything makes sense, however, in the days that follow, you will find yourself revisiting scenes in you head, wondering what they meant, working some of them out.

Sombre is a very difficult film to watch. It will affect you. You will think about it afterwards. To me, this is what films are all about. What you get out of this film is directly proportional to the amount you put in.